"It was a treat to hear and see him with his men," writes Dr.Furnivall.
His object in the work, as he said before the Royal Commission on National Institutions, was _not to make artists_, but to make the workmen better men, to develop their powers and feelings,--to educate them, in short.

He always has urged young people intending to study art as a profession to enter the Academy Schools, as Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites did, or to take up whatever other serious course of practical discipline was open to them.

But he held very strongly that everybody could learn drawing, that their eyes could be brightened and their hands steadied, and that they could be taught to appreciate the great works of nature and of art, without wanting to make pictures or to exhibit and sell them.
It was with this intention that he wrote the "Elements of Drawing" in 1856, supplemented by the "Elements of Perspective" in 1859; the illustrations for the book were characteristic sketches by the author, beautifully cut by his pupil, W.H.Hooper, who was one of a band of engravers and copyists formed by these classes at the Working Men's College.

In spite of the intention not to make artists by his teaching, Ruskin could not prevent some of his pupils from taking up art as a profession; and those who did so became, in their way, first-rate men.
George Allen as a mezzotint engraver, Arthur Burgess as a draughtsman and wood-cutter, John Bunney as a painter of architectural detail, W.
Jeffery as an artistic photographer, E.Cooke as a teacher, William Ward as a facsimile copyist, have all done work whose value deserves acknowledgment, all the more because it was not aimed at popular effect, but at the severe standard of the greater schools.

But these men were only the side issue of the Working Men's College enterprise.